Instagram has confirmed what some creators have suspected. The video-sharing service reduces the quality of your upload, unless it goes viral.
Many people have noticed that the quality of Instagram stories and Reels isn’t consistent. If some of the videos uploaded earlier that looked fine after publication now look blurry in Instagram’s Highlights section, you’re not alone. As it turns out, Instagram does stream videos that aren’t getting enough views at a lower bit rate (the video file itself doesn’t change).
Instagram head Adam Mosseri has confirmed that video quality is throttled for unpopular uploads in response to a user question posed on Threads. “If someone isn’t watching much of your video, Instagram may reduce its quality,” he said. The feature was designed to work “at an aggregate level” instead of an individual viewer level, Mosseri clarified.
Turning on Instagram’s secret high quality video option won’t help because streaming quality is determined on the fly. Many other platforms also reduce video quality to save on bandwidth and storage costs. “We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views,” Mosseri added.
Some creators pointed out that the logic disadvantages smaller channels which won’t be getting a high enough engagement because no one likes to watch blurry videos on their smartphone. As a result, smaller channels may find it even more difficult to grow their audience and compete with bigger channels.
Unfortunatelly, there’s not much that you can do here, except uploading to YouTube if you want a high quality version to be accessible to everyone. Your only option on Instagram is to keep uploading your videos to Instagram in recommended formats and resolutions, hoping the algorithm will retain the quality of your uploads. This is especially problematic for Instagram highlights; I’ve curated my Instagram Highlights because I want profile visitors to check out some of my older uploads, but I don’t want them watching blurry Reels and low-quality videos.
Things are the same on many other platforms. Most social media sites move old videos to a cheaper database storage by design. I don’t use Instagram much, but I was a big fan of Facebook back in the day. I uploaded countless photographs to Facebook to use as my photo backup storage. But over the years, the quality of all my old Facebook uploads has declined significantly because Meta needed to save money on storage.
Source: Adam Mosseri on Threads
